Views of the Cosmos by Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B.

Encounter with mystery is our basic religious experience; it is our confrontation with the “Holy,” with a power beyond our comprehension which challenges us, and to which we yet feel akin.

[Cont. from page 3] 

In connection with creation myths, the more ancient concept of a Supreme Being long persists even in a more complex cultural environment, at least in the form of one supreme head of a hierarchy or family of gods. But these minor gods are much closer to human concerns than the transcendent Creator who made both humans and the gods. For they are personifications of the powers which most preoccupy people in daily life, especially in agrarian cultures: the earth, vegetation, sun, moon, and stars, the seasons, or the weather. Sometimes they are magnified figures of ancestors. The more their characteristics are projected onto the image of the Supreme Being, the more the concept of creation changes from a “making” to a “begetting” of the world by the gods, or to an impersonal evolving of both gods and world out of primordial chaos. Where this process is completed, people no longer take the transcendent into view. Their worldview becomes a “closed” one.

It has not always been sufficiently stressed that the open and the closed worldview are two diametrically opposed metaphysical perspectives. But we must also stress a psychological similarity, in spite of their metaphysical opposition. Metaphysically the Mystery on which the open worldview focuses is altogether transcendent, although it will not be neatly distinguished in every case from mysterious phenomena which belong to the cosmos. For the closed worldview, on the other hand, there is nothing beyond this cosmos, nothing transcendent, and so mystery is merely that which lies beyond peoples' comprehension. But psychologically, mystery is in both cases the “real reality” behind everything; in both cases it is known through symbol, expressed through myth and shared through ritual. Myth, symbol, and ritual are the forms of humanity’s encounter with mystery, and so they will bear the marks of this encounter, which has one typical emphasis within the framework of the open, and quite a different one within the framework of the closed view of the cosmos.

Encounter with mystery is our basic religious experience; it is our confrontation with the “Holy,” with a power beyond our comprehension which challenges us, and to which we yet feel akin. This experience places us humans at the crossroads of two tendencies: the tendency to give ourselves over to this power (the religious attitude toward the Holy), and the tendency to lay hold of this power, to make use of it according to our own will (the magic attitude toward the Holy). Most often we find both tendencies expressed side by side in primordial no less than in contemporary religion.

The religious attitude will be emphasized to the extent to which a person’s world is “transparent” for the transcendent. This stands to reason. For the only appropriate attitude toward the “all-Powerful,” the “Un-explainable,” is reverence and obedience.

» next page